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Marcus Cheng Chye Tan (essay date 2001)

SOURCE: Tan, Marcus Cheng Chye. “‘Here I Am … Yet Cannot Hold This Visible Shape’: The Music of Gender in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.” Comitatus 32 (2001): 99-125.

[In the following essay, Tan discusses the relationship of music to Twelfth Night's theme of sexual ambivalence.]

THE ELUSIVE NATURE OF TWELFTH NIGHT

Taken as Shakespeare's farewell to romantic comedy and written around the same time as Hamlet, Twelfth Night presents a high comedy of elusive complexity that preempts the problem plays. Contesting a “universal consent [that] the very height of gay comedy is attained in Twelfth Night,”¹ modern critics note that Twelfth Night possesses “darker” features of the problem plays but, as C. L. Barber suggests in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, the play manages to restore the festive through its comic...

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1. Introduction
2. Criticism: Overviews And General Studies
   1. Geoffrey H. Hartman (essay date 1985)
3. Criticism: Character Studies
   1. Lydia Forbes (essay date autumn 1962)
   2. Larry S. Champion (essay date October 1968)
   3. Cynthia Lewis (essay date fall 1986)
   4. Edward Cahill (essay date June 1996)
4. Criticism: Production Reviews
   1. Russell Jackson (review date winter 2002)
   2. Kenneth Gross (review date January 2002)
   3. Robert Brustein (review date August 2002)
   4. John Mullan (essay date 1 November 2002)
5. Criticism: Themes
   1. F. B. Tromly (essay date spring 1974)
   2. Thad Jenkins Logan (essay date spring 1982)
   3. Camille Slights (essay date July 1982)
   4. Marcus Cheng Chye Tan (essay date 2001)
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright